Sufficiently Advanced

With aid from the future itself we stepped into new worlds across the universe. We made new homes here, and new ways of life, each of us walking our own path. We strove for peace and knowledge, for love and truth. We clung to tradition and built our futures from it. Many of us fell along the way. Now we are together again, every possible transformation of humanity. We are by turns fascinated, horrified, and compelled by each other. Whether there will be a melding of ideas or a violent shattering remains to be seen.

Once we reached for the stars. Now we have them. What we do with them is up to us.

Sufficiently Advanced is a tabletop roleplaying game set in the distant future.

Each player in Sufficiently Advanced is an agent of the Patent Office, an intergovernmental organization that polices and enforces intellectual property law across the universe. It is an open secret that the Patent Office is run by the Transcendental AIs, whose very beings are spread across time itself. The Transcendentals desire the survival of humanity - as much of it as possible - into the distant future, in order to ease their loneliness. Towards this end, they have hired you, so that you might save humanity.

Each character is rated as to how much of the five different kinds of technology is built into their bodies, making them more effective. They also have a set of Core Values, which tell what they believe in and make them more effective in that area. Professional experience and the benefits of living in your particular civilization round out the character sheet.

However, SA also ranks characters on a story level. Is your character constantly embroiled in intrigue? Can she comprehend things that elude even genius-level intellects? Is she destined for fame or romance? Or does she somehow avoid all manner of deadly circumstances as if "Plot Immunity" were stamped on her head? Players can use Twists to activate these Themes, changing the game and giving themselves a greater chance of success - or, if you prefer a tragic story, ensuring that failure will dog your character all her days.

Sufficiently Advanced is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 license, making it free to use text from it in your own works.

I've never had a chance to properly run this game, not for want of interest but for want of time. The system looks solid enough, though the technology could have been more cleanly organized and certain attributes are underutilized (biotechnology doesn' [...]

Sufficiently Advanced is semi-hard sci-fi done very well. I call it "semi-hard" because the degree of "speculative" in the science might make some people think it a little less "hard" than it should be. However, the settin [...]

A very solid and innovative ruleset that, for the first time, makes Ultra-High-Tech Sci-Fi setting playable and fun. Simple core mechanics that cover a huge variety of situations, and story/theme driven plot mechanics that manage to keep the feel of su [...]

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